Who had the toy first is unknown. But when 3-year-old Damien Ortiz grabbed it from younger brother Gabriel and both boys started to fuss, their father Paul was right there to calm things down.

“Kids are sneaky little buggers,” he said. “As soon as you leave the room, they start fighting. You've got to stay present and stay involved.”

Teaching children how to communicate and negotiate with each other gives them skills they'll need in adulthood — skills that our elected officials seemed to forget how to use recently, resulting in last month's partial government shutdown. We'll see how some of those officials fare this election day.

What children don't need is a gimmick.

That's what psychotherapist and author Linda Perlman Gordon calls Internet-popular tactics such as the “Get Along Shirt,” a super-size T-shirt that parents have two children wear at the same time until they stop fighting.

As cute and funny as they might be, tactics like that won't work, Gordon said.

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“It's artificial, and whenever you create an artificial experience it just becomes a novelty,” she said. “I would prefer (parents) use real-world examples of sharing and create real experiences. Go read a book together, go out and throw the ball, have some downtime that doesn't have screen time so that they have to figure out what to do.”

Part of the problem might be that children nowadays have fewer opportunities to share, Gordon said, since family size is smaller than a generation ago.

“Children aren't forced to sit and share games anymore,” Gordon said. “There's a lot of parallel play — they sit in a room and everyone's got their own screen, everybody's looking straight ahead.”

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Can't we all just get along?

Express-News staffers came up with this list of San Antonio area feuds — recent and ongoing, serious and silly — that may have folks divided:

“With the 2-year-olds, there's not a lot of language,” she said. “If one bites, we keep repeating to them what the mouth is for — eating, talking, brushing teeth.

“With the 3-year-olds, there's a gut reaction to act out physically. We remind them to use their words and explain why they're upset instead.”

Things are more complicated with the older children who come to the center after school. Linares said she recently had a problem with two girls, ages 9 and 10, who paired off and were saying mean things about the other kids in the room.

“It was the beginnings of bullying,” she said. “It was so sad.”

The girls were separated and told they couldn't sit together again until they got along with everyone in the class. Linares also borrowed from her own teachers' methods from when she was a child.

“They had to fill a page, front and back, writing what they did wrong and how they could correct their behavior,” she said. “One girl came back the next day with an apology letter that she'd written on her own.”

As children get older, the arguments might change from being about things to just plain disliking each other. Though it's common, especially among siblings, Gordon said it is a sign of an underlying issue.

“There may be things happening in the family system where one child feels another one is favored,” she said. “It could be a temperament difference where one kid is more sensitive than another. That's when I put my therapy hat on.”

The most important thing is that parents don't just sit back and do nothing.

Ortiz, a former Marine, said he used to be heavy-handed with his sons, but learned quickly that if he yelled at them to stop fighting, it only made things worse. Now, when the boys are upset, Ortiz has them look him in the eyes until they calm down enough to talk about what's wrong.

“You have to be interactive, you have to be diligent,” he said. “But the main thing I've learned is to keep calm, because calmness spreads.”